Rosalie Gascoigne Paintings & Artwork for Sale | Rosalie Gascoigne Art Value Price Guide

Jan. 15, 2025
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $250 - $350
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Dec. 18, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $250 - $350
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Dec. 10, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $250 - $350
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Nov. 26, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, ALL THAT JAZZ, 1989
Est: $400,000 - $600,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) ALL THAT JAZZ, 1989 sawn and split soft drink crates on plywood 131.0 x 100.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ALL THAT JAZZ / 1989 / Rosalie Gascoigne PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 15 March 2006, lot 21 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED What Is Contemporary Art?, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, 3 June – 30 July 1989 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 48) Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 18 November 1989, cat. 6 (label attached verso) 20th Century Australian and New Zealand Paintings, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 22 August – 28 September 1991, cat. 77 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, 22 February – 16 May 2004, cat. 14 Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 47 LITERATURE Allen, C., ‘Bill Robinson: Rosalie Gascoigne’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 27, December 1989, p. 19 Delaruelle, J., ‘Free of gobbledegook’, Sydney Review, Sydney, December 1989, p. 16 Johnson, A., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’, Art & Text, no. 36, May 1990, p. 151 (illus.) McDonald, E., ‘“There are only lovers and others …” An interview with Rosalie Gascoigne’, Antic, Auckland, no. 8, December 1990, p. 13 (illus.) Drury, N., Images in Contemporary Australian Painting, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1992, pl. 162, pp. 176 (illus.), 177, 257 Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, pl. 7, pp. 45 (illus.), 112 Gascoigne, M., ‘No ordinary woman’, Alumni News, University of Auckland, vol. 12, no. 1, 2002, cover (illus.), p. 2 Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2004, pl. 18, p. 68 (illus.) McAloon, W., ‘Roadrunner’, New Zealand Listener, vol. 193, no. 3336, 17 – 23 April 2004 Armstrong, C., 'Collector profile: Pat Corrigan AM', Art and Australia, vol. 43, no. 3, Autumn 2006, p. 450 (illus., installation view) Dedman, R., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’, Australian Art Market Report, issue 24, Winter 2007, p. 24 (illus.) Grant, J., ‘Set the letters free’, Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design, no. 64, 2007, p. 29 (illus.) Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 21, 100 (illus.), 135 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 345, pp. 236 (illus.), 332, 350 – 351, 353, 370 ESSAY ‘Gascoigne’s art communicates a fervent commitment to life. She flourished from middle into old age, while her peers underwent the more usual passage to resignation and calm wisdom. Most people accept the weakening. Rosalie, growing older, sharpened herself. Her art affirmed the sap of life within weathered forms.’1 Rosalie Gascoigne first discovered wooden soft drink crates in 1978 at the Schweppes depot in Queanbeyan, NSW, near Canberra, gathering them up and taking them home with no predetermined sense as to how they would be used in her art. They first appeared in their full, unadorned form in the twenty-piece work, March Past, 1978 – 79 (National Gallery of Australia); its rows of alternating horizontal boards of red, green and faded natural wood inspired by the Anzac Day March she had recently witnessed on a trip to Melbourne.2 Gascoigne was hooked. From that serendipitous moment she was to use the material across her oeuvre in around 130 works, even returning to her precious stockpile in 1999, the last year of her life, after transition of the manufacture of the crates to plastic had seen them become an increasingly rare resource.3 As the artist’s husband, astronomer Ben Gascoigne recalled, Gascoigne’s capacity for collecting this material en masse was considerable, and it served her well: ‘It could be disconcerting, returning home after a day at the office, to find the drive blocked by a couple of hundred soft drink crates. They had to be sorted, stacked, cleaned and dismantled, the latter process involving pulling out up to forty nails from each box, with no short cuts. The family helped, but she did most of the work herself.’4 Initially, Gascoigne combined the beautiful, weathered woods and colours of the planks of drink crates in elegant compositions that lyrically evoked the Australian bush. The typography of various printed brands on these crates – Dales, Tarax, Crystal, Swing – is used to great effect, dancing across the surfaces of works as if mirroring the experience of dappled light and of the changing seasons on the landscape. However, once this preoccupation had run its course, she began to split the boards – first with a tomahawk, and then, a bandsaw – often manipulating the graphic black lettering of her much-loved yellow Schweppes crates into tightly compacted groupings which made the fragmented letters seem to jostle, bounce or rustle across the picture plane. Notably, All That Jazz, 1989 was shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in November 1989. Gascoigne’s first solo exhibition in Sydney since her Gallery A début in 1976, this landmark exhibition brought together major soft drink crate works such as Monaro, 1988 – 89 (Art Gallery of Western Australia); Wheat Belt, 1989 (National Gallery of Australia); and Outback, 1988, with a significant group of retro-reflective road sign works in her signature yellow and orange. As we see in the majestic All That Jazz, 1989, this way of working with the slithers of boards also coalesced with Gascoigne’s use of the grid as an important organising principle within her work. Closely aligned to Modernist art practice, the tessellation, compression and repetition that occurs across the work’s structure, no longer evokes feelings or sensations related to the natural world, but instead suggests, in the self-conscious regulation of its surface, a sense of continuum and endlessness that is in and of the work itself. Calling to mind an elaborate and highly coloured patchwork quilt (particularly the geometric creations of the Gee’s Bend quilters of America’s Deep South), the knowing combination of the work’s title and form brings a sense of musicality and lively movement to the piece. As Mary Eagle has observed: ‘…[A] work by Gascoigne gains aesthetic impact by virtue of how an underlying grid or cell-like structure serves as a ground for deviations – of wave after wave, mirroring, reorientation, transposition, positive-negative inversion, counter-balance, swivelling and, in the text panels, a play of words.’5 Like all the artist’s work, the creation of All That Jazz was a haptic rather than predetermined experience. Gascoigne was opposed to the idea of planning, and didn’t draw, use collage, or experiment with compositional ideas before commencing a piece. As the artist’s son, Martin Gascoigne has noted, her approach was ‘visual and practical, not conceptual’, and she let her materials ‘take her by the arm’.6 By glueing the slithers of wood to a plywood backing board and working in small component parts, Gascoigne could shuffle the pieces until they settled in place and felt ‘right’. As she remarked, ‘I can’t do anything except I can see and I can arrange… but mostly I can arrange …I can do something that feels like something but I can’t do anything that looks like something.’7 Before beginning, there was no sense as to scale or if the work was single or multi-panelled, horizontal or vertical. This was determined in the making, and in the time sitting with and studying the piece after its completion. This was also the stage at which it was given a title – the title the work seemed to demand for itself. 1. Eagle, M., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: Artist and Sculptor’, The Age, 1 November 1999 2. Rosalie Gascoigne, cited in Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 187. March Past, 1978 – 79 was first exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney in 1979 3. ibid., pp. 71, 78, 120. The last work Gascoigne made with soft drink crates was Great Blond Paddocks, 1998 – 99. In his catalogue raisonné, Martin Gascoigne gives two different totals, saying Gascoigne made around 127 works from soft drink crates (p. 71) as well as around 130 (p. 120) 4. Gascoigne, S.C.B., ‘The Artist-In-Residence’ in Eagle, M. (ed.), From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, The Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 12 5. Eagle, M., 'Rosalie Gascoigne’s Lyrical Derailments' in Seear, L. & Ewington, J. (eds.), Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966 – 2006, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2007, p. 200 6. Gascoigne, M., op. cit., p. 70 7. Rosalie Gascoigne, cited in Peter Ross, ‘Interview with Rosalie Gascoigne (transcript)’, Review, ABC TV, broadcast 12 August 1990. KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2024
Deutscher and Hackett
Nov. 20, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $300 - $500
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Nov. 20, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), The Teaparty 1980
Est: $30,000 - $50,000
PROPERTY FORMERLY FROM THE GASCOIGNE FAMILY COLLECTION, CANBERRA ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) The Teaparty 1980 weathered wooden apiary box, plastic carnival sideshow dolls and wings, rusted enameled metal utensils 82.0 x 35.0 x 19.0 cm
Menzies
Oct. 23, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $300 - $500
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Oct. 07, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, (1917 - 1999), Metropolis, decorative print after the original, 43 x 62 cm. (16.9 x 24.4 in.), frame: 51 x 70 x 2 cm. (20.0 x 27.5 x 0.7 in.)
Est: $300 - $500
† ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) Metropolis decorative print after the original gallery frame
Lawsons
Sep. 24, 2024
Rosalie Gascoigne, (1917-1999), For Ray, 1979, painted weathered wood, printed card, plastic doll hands, perished rubber non-slip matting, 10 x 13.5 x 9 cm
Est: $4,000 - $6,000
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) For Ray, 1979 painted weathered wood, printed card, plastic doll hands, perished rubber non-slip matting titled, dated and signed verso 'For Ray, June 16 1979, RG'
Shapiro Auctioneers
Sep. 23, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), After Metropolis
Est: $300 - $500
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) After Metropolis off-set lithograph 57.5 x 80cm
Gibson's
Aug. 28, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, ON A CLEAR DAY, 1988
Est: $80,000 - $120,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) ON A CLEAR DAY, 1988 weathered, sawn plywood on weathered galvanized iron on plywood 132.0 x 91.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “ON A CLEAR DAY” / 1988 / Rosalie Gascoigne PROVENANCE Pinacotheca, Melbourne Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 1988 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 28 September – 15 October 1988, cat. 19 LITERATURE MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 329, pp. 233 (illus.), 331 ESSAY When Rosalie Gascoigne made On a Clear Day in 1988, she had been exhibiting for just 14 years, not yet quite classifiable, at the age of 71, as a mid-career artist. However, in this relatively short space of time, her work had already been included in a raft of significant exhibitions, including two Sydney Biennales (1979 and 1988), and she had been honoured, in 1982, as the first woman to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.1 She was at the height of her powers. As an artist, Gascoigne seemed to emerge fully formed, capturing the art world’s imagination as a result. But she had, as curator and art historian Deborah Clark has acknowledged, ‘been rehearsing for it all her life.’2 With a background in Sogetsu Ikebana, a sharp and inquisitive intellect, and a keen eye, Gascoigne had been making ‘arrangements’ with things selected from the natural world for most of her life, and it is from this experience that she developed the unique visual language that was to catapult her to international success. While Gascoigne proposed that the seemingly singular nature of her practice stemmed from the fact that her vision was neither tainted nor influenced by her being taught the ‘rules’, the necessity and power of her art nevertheless remained for her an essential truth. As she stated: ‘For me, the bottom line in art is honesty. It depends on how much you have inside yourself, as to how much you can put into a work of art. I look for the eternal truths in nature, the rhythms, cycles, seasons, shapes, regeneration, restorative powers, spirit. I’m showing what I believe to be interesting and beautiful.’3 Gascoigne loved weathered wood, which she collected from dumps, building sites and recycling centres, and the composition of On a Clear Day would have resulted from her moving the different pieces of found plywood around until they ‘fell into place’. The influence of ikebana is clearly embodied in the work’s restrained and elegant aesthetic; its quiet solemnity derived as much from the marriage of simple shapes and restricted palette as from what is left out. Indeed, its success comes from a knowing combination of intuition and discipline and the artist’s concentrated search for an essential form that is equally based upon a ruthless sense of acceptance or rejection. The work’s title, which would have been given to the piece after its completion, adds the final touch – evoking both the way in which forms in the natural world are crisply delineated on a clear day, and the lyrics of the song from the 1965 Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, made famous by Barbara Streisand in the 1970 film adaptation: ‘On a clear day / Rise and look around you / And you,ll see who / You are … And on a clear day / On that clear day / You can see forever and ever / And ever / And evermore’. 1. Technically, Thea Proctor (1879 – 1966) was the first Australian woman to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale (in 1912), but her work was shown as part of the British representation. 2. Clark, D., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne 1917 – 1999’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 127, December 1999, p. 38 3. Hawley, J. ‘A Late Developer’, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 15 November 1997, p. 44 KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2024
Deutscher and Hackett
Aug. 28, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, PLAZA, 1988
Est: $160,000 - $220,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) PLAZA, 1988 sawn retroreflective plywood road signs on plywood 148.0 x 84.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: ,Plaza, / 1988 / Rosalie Gascoigne PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 26 October 1989 Sotheby,s, Sydney, 25 August 2015, lot 14 Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, 28 September - 15 October 1988, cat. 2 Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 31 October - 18 November 1989, cat. 7 LITERATURE Allen, C., ,Bill Robinson; Rosalie Gascoigne,, Art Monthly Australia, December 1989 - January 1990, p. 19 MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 336, pp. 234 (illus.), 331, 332 ESSAY With regular square tiles radiating warmth and marked by palpable traces of human activity, Rosalie Gascoigne’s vibrant orangey-red assemblage, Plaza, 1988 poetically reflects our built environment and its interaction with the larger, untameable landscape. While during the early years of Gascoigne’s foraging practice, she favoured the pale weathered timber of discarded apiary boxes and soft-drink crates, the discovery of a cache of discarded and cut-up road signs in a depot near Collector in 1985 stimulated an unlikely adoption of these bold artefacts into her panel reliefs.1 ‘We all look at road signs an awful lot, and they do get into the consciousness’, she explained.2 These retro-reflective panels emblazoned with stark black capitalised text against high-visibility yellow and red, would become a defining signature material of Gascoigne’s mature works. Plaza was amongst the first works made of the darker hue, one of four exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery in 1988 (alongside Persimmon, 1987; Chart, 1988; and Party Piece, 1988). Coming to art in mid-life, Gascoigne’s artworks were infused with the traces of previous experiences and honed talents, for example, an interest in botany and Ikebana or, perhaps more enduringly, a love of language and wordplay – her acute poetic aptitude anchored by having read English at university. Gascoigne had already incorporated text into her works in the form of meaningless brand names from the late 1970s, but it was only through road signs that her mastery of text fragmentation and abstract re-distribution of divorced syllables was fully displayed. The critic Christopher Allen noted this difference in how the artist employed the new road signs, singling out her use of square sections rather than thin strips, and her preference for isolating individual letters and syllables rather than preserving intact words.3 This can be ascribed to the artist’s desire to erase all functional meaning from her original foraged materials, creating in its place a semi-abstract design, with elusive readability. More often than not, a poetry of association can be found in the artist’s choice of title for her finished assemblages. Plaza, like previous works with titles centred around ideas of civil engineering and its associated semiotics, has summery connotations of warm Mediterranean paving stones and outdoor meeting places of organic social congregation. Plaza is arranged in a strict Modernist grid. Its large vertical rectangle comprises five rows of three identical square units, each with at least one fragment of black text, some with up to two intact letters. The relative size of the lettering is uneven, as is their vertical justification. The effect is airy and scattered, with ‘sequences that can be read across from one tile to another’4 (for example P/EN in the centre right), creating a sensation of fluid horizontal movement. For all of Gascoigne’s apparent adherence to the ultra-modernist rigour of planar and grid-based constructions, painterly surface effects of weathering: scratches, gouges and palimpsests, transform these panels into contemporary expressionist abstractions to be admired for their purely formal qualities. This is further accentuated through Gascoigne’s subtle use of panels bearing retro-reflective film, to be encountered par hasard, ‘meant, like road signs in daylight, to glance and smile at you, then sulk and go away… remain a transient, living, pulsing thing.’5 1. ‘A byproduct of the new road through to Goulburn’, in Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, pp. 88, 220 2. Rosalie Gascoigne, ‘Canberra School of Art Lecture’, 1985, cited ibid., p. 221 3. Allen, C., ‘Bill Robinson: Rosalie Gascoigne’, Art Monthly Australia, Dec 1989 – Jan 1990, no. 27, p. 19 4. ibid. 5. Rosalie Gascoigne discussing retroreflection in 1990 with reference to Lamplit, 1989, although the effect is general and applicable to several works, see: Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ibid., p. 238 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2024
Deutscher and Hackett
Aug. 27, 2024
Rosalie Gascoigne, (1917-1999), Twig Tidy, c. 1972-73, rusted metal and thistle stalks, height 64 cm
Est: $8,000 - $12,000
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) Twig Tidy, c. 1972-73 rusted metal and thistle stalks
Shapiro Auctioneers
Aug. 27, 2024
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) River Banks, 1977-81 (overall)
Est: $40,000 - $60,000
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) River Banks, 1977-81 signed, dated and titled verso: 'RG 1981 / RIVER BANKS / (5 PANELS)' tape attached with instructions: 'HUNG ON / 5 NAILS / 7 1/2 ' APART' weathered wood palings, torn and cut patterned linoleum 151.5 x 92.0cm (59 5/8 x 36 1/4in). (overall)
Bonhams
Jun. 26, 2024
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Bread and Butter 1994
Est: $50,000 - $70,000
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, PARIS ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Bread and Butter 1994 sawn, painted and stencilled wood from cable reels on composition board 62.5 x 50.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Rosalie Gascoigne/ BREAD AND BUTTER/ 1994
Menzies
May. 21, 2024
Rosalie Gascoigne, (1917-1999), For Ray, 1979, painted weathered wood, printed card, plastic doll hands, perished rubber non-slip matting, 10 x 13.5 x 9 cm
Est: $6,000 - $8,000
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) For Ray, 1979 painted weathered wood, printed card, plastic doll hands, perished rubber non-slip matting titled, dated and signed verso 'For Ray, June 16 1979, RG'
Shapiro Auctioneers
Nov. 22, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, ARCHIPELAGO, 1993
Est: $80,000 - $120,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) ARCHIPELAGO, 1993 torn and cut patterned linoleum on treated Masonite panels on composition board five panels 30.5 × 50.5 cm (each) left panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ARCHIPELAGO / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1993 / 1. / LEFT AS FACING WALL each panel inscribed with the numbers 1 to 5 PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Canberra Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 5 - 22 May 1993, cat. 5 Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 22 April - 22 May 2004, cat. 12 LITERATURE Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 465, pp. 70, 115, 261 (illus.), 339, 352 Anderson, P., ‘An Eye for Poet ry in the Ordinary’, The Australian, 11 May 2004, p. 14 ESSAY Quintessentially ‘Australian’ materials such as corrugated iron and linoleum appear early in Rosalie Gascoigne’s oeuvre, often alluding to the physical hardships of colonial settlement and attempts to cultivate the land, while managing to capture ephemeral sensations specifically related to an experience of this continent – feelings of heat, light, air, space, and of making one’s way through the landscape.1 While Gascoigne categorically denied the connection to domesticity evoked by the use of humble household linoleum in her works,2 as a letter to her son Toss reveals, she was clearly drawn to the potential of its gaudy, high-keyed colours and its richly decorative patterns: ‘Another domestic buy I made is abt [sic.] 8 metres of Clarke [sic.] rubber lino… It is gaudy, with colour-photo flowers – seed packet plus. Very blue and peach and yellow and white and green – delphiniums, roses, daisies, peonies – the lot. The young man looked at it with distaste and said ‘you can have the lot for $10, we'll never sell it. There's about $80 worth there.’ ‘Done’ I said. After all, I can reline the kitchen cupboards if worst comes to the worst.’3 Made late in the artist’s career, Archipelago, 1993 demonstrates the way in which Gascoigne returned to her vast material stockpiles over the decades, using a particular material when both the mood and intuition inspired her. Between 1977 and 1993 she made around fifty works with lino, with over fifteen different patterns, in what was, in her words, a ‘twenty-year love affair’.4 As the artist’s studio assistant, Peter Vandermark has observed, Gascoigne ‘liked the hazard of not knowing’,5 and would have initially worked on the individual units of Archipelago with no predetermined sense of its final scale. On completion, the individual panels would similarly have sat in her studio for a time before being named. Gascoigne preferred to allow her works to simply ‘be’, waiting until the moment when the work itself presented an evocative title that managed to open up, rather than shut down, its allusive possibilities. It is through this astute combination of name and material form that the pieces of torn linoleum in Archipelago transform into a group of islands floating in the sea, their jagged coastlines viewed from above as if in an old-school atlas. Yet despite the sense of mystery and nostalgia that recollection of this activity invites, in the twenty-first century, Archipelago’s evocation of a cluster of potentially vulnerable islands on a map cannot help but transcend the artist’s initial intentions, becoming a poetic meditation on power, borders and boundaries, and the impacts of climate change. Given Gascoigne’s description of herself as ‘a sideways thinker’,6 one can fairly assume that she would have enjoyed the new and vital associations that the work continues to bring. As she has said: ‘I like going foraging with an open mind and happening upon things. It is a non-binding sort of art. I can fly off at tangents and be diverted by the unexpected. I read somewhere of ‘lyrical derangements.’ It fits my approach.’7 1. Rosalie Gascoigne’s first major work in corrugated iron was Standing Piece, 1973 – 74; her first works in linoleum were River Banks, 1977 and Step Through, 1977/c. 1979 – 80. Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, pp. 63 & 159 2. Artist’s notes on Step Through, 1977/c. 1979–80, dated 24 February 1987, National Gallery of Australia artist file 3. Gascoigne, R., Letter to Toss Gascoigne, c. 10 June 1979, supplied to the author by Martin Gascoigne. Martin Gascoigne states the lino purchased from Clark Rubber was never used: see Gascoigne, M., 2019, op. cit., p. 114 4. The artist, lecture delivered at Auckland Art Gallery, July 1999. Transcript in Auckland Art Gallery Library, cited in Gascoigne, ibid., p. 115 5. Vandermark, P., cited in Gascoigne, ibid., p. 70 6. Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 12 7. Gascoigne, R., cited in Bottrell, F., The Artist Craftsman in Australia, Jack Pollard Pty Ltd, Crows Nest, New South Wales, 1972, p. 39 KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023
Deutscher and Hackett
Nov. 22, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, THE FALL, 1981
Est: $400,000 - $600,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) THE FALL, 1981 painted and stencilled wooden boards from soft-drink boxes on plywood backing 218.0 x 137.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: R.G. 1981 / THE FALL PROVENANCE Pinacotheca, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1981 Yuill | Crowley, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2001 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 29 April – 16 May 1981, cat. 4 Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 25 LITERATURE MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 20, 90 (illus.), 135 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 209, pp. 201 (illus.), 353 ESSAY While the aesthetic, emotional and intellectual appeal of Rosalie Gascoigne’s work is timeless, its material presence speaks of another era – a period in which the local tip was a treasure trove for those with a keen eye, full of a raft of ‘stuff’, ripe for creative repurposing. One of the artist’s earliest exhibitions showcased elements from a carnival sideshow that she had found at the Bungendore tip, on the outskirts of Canberra1, and across her career, her various finds – of kewpie dolls, beer cans, enamelware, linoleum and apiary boxes, amongst other things, are transformed into works that evoke associations and emotions that far transcend their humble beginnings as timeworn found objects. Gascoigne’s ‘hunting ground’ took in Bungendore, Braidwood, Queanbeyan, Captain’s Flat, Tharwa, Michelago, Bredbo, Cooma, Wee Jasper, Yass, Murrumbateman, Gundaroo and Collector2, as well as the city of Canberra, but she was also not averse to offering a roadside crew some beers in exchange for materials that caught her eye. As her studio assistant, artist Peter Vandermark recalled of these trips: ‘When I went out with her in the car she was almost silent, yet it never felt uncomfortable. At the tip we’d split up and go in different directions. After looking, she’d get me to pick up the things she’d selected. Usually she’d come home with something, a couple of pieces of tin maybe, but it didn’t matter if we returned with nothing. There was no music, I’d drive and she’d just check out the landscape. Rosalie would bring the same things each time: a Thermos of coffee, a packet of date roll biscuits, some pieces of fruit – a snack. We’d take time off. At Captain’s Flat, for example, we’d stop at the oval and if there was a road-working team, she’d go up to them, introduce herself, explain how she used the signs. She knew the best way to get the signs was to carry a slab of beer in the car. She knew the currency of workers.’3 Gascoigne initially discovered an enormous cache of soft drink crates at a depot in Queanbeyan, carrying them home on the roof racks of her car.4 At this early stage, they were available in an array of colours, and discards could be purchased by the truckload. Later, when the artist told Schweppes of her use for their crates, the factory manager gave her unlimited access to their discards yard.5 Sadly, this was not to last, as the company eventually moved to using plastic crates, which were of no interest to her. Using these materials was a time-consuming and labour-intensive exercise, with each horde having to be sorted, stacked, cleaned and dismantled – including pulling out up to forty nails from each box – before the process of beginning the work could even commence.6 The Fall, 1981 dates from a period in which Gascoigne primarily (but not exclusively) used the whole boards of the crates, arranging them in some of the largest and most ambitious works she made with this material. The palette of the crates of the different companies – Crystal, Sharpe’s, Swing and Schweppes – is used to great effect, creating a sense of dappled colour and movement across the work as the typography of the various logos jostle and shimmer; their vertical arrangement creating a sense of the planks falling, like autumn leaves, from the top to the bottom of the composition. Together, the gentle movement of the work’s component parts in concert with its title, powerfully evoke the inevitability of time passing, and of seasonal change. Named, as Gascoigne’s works characteristically were, well after its completion, The Fall is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre for drawing upon a real-life event for its titular inspiration. The work in part alludes to Mrs Jean Thomas, mother of celebrated curator and art historian Daniel Thomas, who was living in Canberra and working at the National Gallery of Australia when the piece was made. As NGA colleague John McPhee later relayed to Thomas: ‘Rosalie told me that the painting was called The fall after an encounter with your mother. She had seen her making her way from the shops in Kingston to our flat and seemed to be making a tough task of it. She picked her up and took her home. The title was more a reference to our fall from youth, grace, etc, rather than a real fall. Autumnal years I suppose.’7 1. Assemblage, Gallery A, Sydney, 1976. 2. Clark, D., ‘Standing on the Mountain: The Landscape Impulse in Rosalie Gascoigne’s Art’ in Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, p. 28 3. Vandermark, P. in Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 23 4. Gascoigne cited in Davidson, K. & M. Desmond, Islands: Contemporary Installations from Australia, Asia, Europe and America, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1996, p. 14 5. MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, pp. 33 – 34 6. Gascoigne, S.C.B., ‘The Artist-in-Residence’ in Eagle, op.cit., p. 12 7. Personal communication, Daniel Thomas to Martin Gascoigne, 2004 cited in Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 201 KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023
Deutscher and Hackett
Nov. 21, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Orchard (1986) synthetic polymer paint on sawn and split soft-drink wooden crates on plywood 137 x 117 x 6.
Est: $500,000 - $700,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Orchard (1986) synthetic polymer paint on sawn and split soft-drink wooden crates on plywood 137 x 117 x 6.5 cm PROVENANCE Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Pinacotheca, Melbourne Corporate Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 12 April 1986 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 15 October - 1 November 1986, no. 6 LITERATURE Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 293, pp. 95, 121, 224 (illustrated), 416
Smith & Singer
Nov. 21, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Grasslands 1987 synthetic polymer paint on sawn and split soft-drink wooden crates on plywood 92 x 217 cm
Est: $500,000 - $700,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Grasslands 1987 synthetic polymer paint on sawn and split soft-drink wooden crates on plywood signed, dated and inscribed 'GRASSLANDS 1987 / Gascoigne' verso 92 x 217 cm PROVENANCE: Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Bruce Pollard, Melbourne Private Collection, Sydney Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2002 EXHIBITIONS: Third Australian Sculpture Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 September - 22 October 1987 LITERATURE: Graeme Sturgeon, Third Australian Sculpture Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 106 Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 107 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 304, pp. 67, 227 (illustrated), 415, 'Grasslands [I]'
Smith & Singer
Nov. 21, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Fragmentation 1991 sawn plywood and paint on hardboard 122 x 84 cm
Est: $300,000 - $500,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Fragmentation 1991 sawn plywood and paint on hardboard signed, dated and inscribed 'FRAGMENTATION / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1991' verso 122 x 84 cm PROVENANCE Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1992 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 15 April - 2 May 1992, no. 12 (label verso) Rosalie Gascoigne, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, 18 May - 9 June 2013 LITERATURE Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 404, pp. 121, 248 (illustrated), 337, 414
Smith & Singer
Sep. 20, 2023
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) Across Town, 1991
Est: $3,000 - $5,000
silkscreen on paper, edition: 78/99, numbered and signed below image 78/99, Rosalie Gascoigne
Shapiro Auctioneers
Aug. 23, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Marmalade 1989-1990 sawn plywood retro-reflective road signs on plywood 152.5 x 142.5 cm
Est: $600,000 - $800,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Marmalade 1989-1990 sawn plywood retro-reflective road signs on plywood signed, dated and inscribed 'MARMALADE / 1990 / Rosalie Gascoigne' verso 152.5 x 142.5 cm PROVENANCE Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label verso) Peter Fay, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1990 Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art, The Eighth Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 April - 3 June 1990, no. 169 LITERATURE The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art, The Eighth Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, p. 475 The Readymade Boomerang: Print Portfolio and Documentation, Daadgalerie Berlin and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1992 p. 18 (incorrectly captioned All that Glisters 1989) Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 107 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 379, pp. 243 (illustrated), 371, 372 (illustrated), 416
Smith & Singer
Aug. 16, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, WHITE AND GREY A, 1980
Est: $60,000 - $90,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) WHITE AND GREY A, 1980 painted wood from soft drink boxes on composition board 101.0 × 73.0 cm PROVENANCE The artist Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED From the studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 5 September - 12 November 2000, cat. 7 (as 'Untitled', c.1981) LITERATURE Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 191, pp. 196 (illus.), 348 ESSAY The notion and practice of collecting were of vital importance to Rosalie Gascoigne and over the course of her relatively brief career she amassed vast material stockpiles of feathers, shells, dried grasses and wood, enamel kitchenware and linoleum, beer cans and dolls, and soft-drink crates and retro-reflective road-signs, which were to both become something of a signature material. Gascoigne’s avid fossicking was underpinned by extended periods of driving and exploring in the natural world surrounding Canberra and the unique and spare beauty of the region – and importantly, the experience of it – was to serve as a source of inspiration for much of her art. As she explained: "Most of the things I use have been exposed to the weather and, in this sense, mine is an art of the outdoors. I like to use very ordinary material making do with whatever comes to hand within about a thirty mile radius of Canberra. I collect anything I like the look of, without having any particular plan for it at the time. I collect grey wood and faded colours and if there is a lot of anything I take it – a lot of it." 1 The story of Rosalie Gascoigne is now almost the stuff of legend. Gascoigne had no formal art training, and first exhibited her work at the age of 57; after which she rapidly established a reputation as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. Indeed, following her first exhibition at Canberra’s Macquarie Galleries in June 1974, Gascoigne subsequently developed an impressive exhibition history that included her being honoured, in 1982, as the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.2 While entirely self-taught, Gascoigne was to later acknowledge that her background in Sogetsu Ikebana 3, and the introduction it provided to a sense of order and strong sculptural properties, had played a part in the development of her practice. 4 Tellingly, Sogetsu also emphasises the importance of line and form over colour. As White and Grey A, 1980 demonstrates, this sense of structure was to elegantly combine in Gascoigne’s work with the modern art historical notion of “the grid”, which became an important organising principle of many of her works made from soft-drink crates. In White and Grey A, Gascoigne aligns the components vertically so that the white paint on each board creates a strong (if slightly wonky) horizontal band; establishing a sense of continuum and endlessness, as if it could effectively extend forever. Unlike many of Gascoigne’s more ‘allusive and illusive’ 5 titles, that served to conjure images and associations when looking at her work, she allowed White and Grey A – through the simplicity of its title – to remain an abstraction. Part of the joy of this work, however, is the way in which her rudimentary materials fight back, proudly bearing their uneven edges and the scars and blemishes of their previous lives. Despite Gascoigne’s “will to order”, White and Grey A remains decidedly, and rewardingly, handmade. 1. Artist statement in Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1978, n.p. 2. Technically, Thea Proctor was the first Australian woman to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale, in 1912, but her work was shown as part of the British representation. 3. Founded by Sofu Teshigahara in 1927, Sogetsu embraces a philosophy that combines the naturalistic (and more traditional) approach to ikebana – that is, one that reflects the natural growth of the materials employed – with the expressionistic, as imbued in the subjective response of the arranger or “artist”. 4. Hawley, J., “A late developer”, Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend), Sydney, 15 November 1997, p. 42 5. Artist statement in Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne. KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023
Deutscher and Hackett
May. 03, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, SHEEP WEATHER ALERT 5, 1992 – 93
Est: $150,000 - $200,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) SHEEP WEATHER ALERT 5, 1992 – 93 torn and cut bitumen-based printed linoleum, paint and weathered plywood (diptych) 78.0 x 240.0 cm (overall) left panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: 5A/ SHEEP WEATHER ALERT / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992–1993 5A right panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title upper right (inverted): 5B/SHEEP WEATHER ALERT / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992–1993 5B PROVENANCE Pinacotheca, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 May 2009, lot 212 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 5 – 22 May 1993, cat. 32 Blue Chip: The Collector’s Exhibition, Niagara Galleries at Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, June – July 2010 The Daylight Moon: Rosalie Gascoigne and Lake George, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 26 June – 22 August 2015, cat. 4 (pp. 17, 30, illus. and inside back cover) Spring 2016, Justin Miller Art, Sydney, October – November 2016 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Blue Chip 2020, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, 24 September - 10 October 2020 LITERATURE Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, pl. 22, pp. 60 – 61 (illus.) Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 488, pp. 95, 265 (illus.), 339, 356 ESSAY ‘…Somebody gave me a lot of that lino. I couldn’t stand the interior red and green on it, which in theory were the colours, but the black and grey were good, so I tore it by hand. It turned out in a way like sheep shapes, especially if you saw a mass of them.’1 With her training in the formal discipline of Ikebana complementing her intuitive understanding of the nature of materials, her deep attachment to her environment and later interest in modern art, Rosalie Gascoigne remains one of Australia’s most revered assemblage artists. Bespeaking a staunchness and scrupulous eye, her works are artful and refined, yet always maintain a close connection with the outside world, powerfully evoking remembered feelings or memories in relationship to the landscape; they are ‘instances of emotion recollected in tranquillity’ to quote a phrase of Wordsworth's which was so dear to her. Occupying that space between ‘the world and the world of art’2, Sheep Weather Alert 5, 1992 – 93 offers an impressive example of the assemblages inspired by Gascoigne’s everyday experience of her immediate surroundings on the outskirts of Canberra – and specifically, the region’s biting cold temperatures that posed a tangible threat to newborn lambs and recently shorn sheep. As the artist herself elaborates, ‘‘Sheep weather alert’ is what they say on the weather report. It’s a good name. it means you jolly well get your sheep or you’re going to lose a lot to the cold – it’s a bitter climate here.’ Referring to the present work, she continues ‘This is a misted-over one; they’re washed over, and it reads like shapes looming in the mist. When you have shearing time around Canberra, the yards are full of sheep, the trucks are full of sheep, the hills are full of shorn sheep – sheep, sheep, sheep – you’re just surrounded by it. That was what I was after.’3 Originally part of an eight-piece installation which was later dismantled by the artist, the present diptych features a cool palette of neutral whites, greys and touches of blue to suggest ice, while the scattered forms evoke a myriad of notions from sheep and lambs grazing across fields, to tufts of shorn wool, frozen icicles or even falling snowflakes. Thus, although inextricably linked in their inspiration and materials to her physical surroundings, Gascoigne’s achievements almost always encapsulate a larger, more intangible sense of place that is, paradoxically, ‘both nowhere and everywhere at once’.4 Having eschewed the use of iconography, she favours rather allusion and suggestion to capture the timeless ‘spirit’ of the landscape so that her art ‘may speak for itself’, awakening ‘… associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us’.5 Yet if Sheep Weather Alert 5 functions ‘allusively’ as a rich repository of memories and associations, it also exists ‘illusively’ as a purely abstract form of art, transcending both the materials of its construction and the landscape itself with its formal interest in qualities of colour, texture and repetition. For indeed, as Gascoigne reiterates, ultimately such works are about ‘the pleasures of the eye’, with her manipulations of natural and semi-industrial debris to be appreciated simply as objects of aesthetic delight. Like the materials themselves, beauty is a quality that is easily and thoughtlessly discarded; as John McDonald muses, ‘When we value things for their perceived usefulness, we overlook a more fundamental necessity. Life is impoverished by the inability to recognise beauty in even the most humble guise.’6 1. The artist, quoted in MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 60 2. Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne: Materials as Landscape, Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 11 3. The artist, quoted in MacDonald, 1998, op. cit., p. 60 4. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, 1989, p. 18 5. McDonald, J., ‘Introduction’ in MacDonald, 1998, op. cit., p. 7 6. McDonald, ibid. VERONICA ANGELATOS © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023
Deutscher and Hackett
Mar. 29, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Amber 1992
Est: $50,000 - $70,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Amber 1992 metal reflective road sign and sawn retroreflective plywood road signs on plywood backing 62.0 x 54.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: AMBER/ Rosalie Gascoigne/ 1992
Menzies
Mar. 29, 2023
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Pink on Blue 1982-83
Est: $50,000 - $70,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Pink on Blue 1982-83 painted wood and painted stencilled wood from soft-drink boxes on plywood backing 101.0 x 87.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: PINK ON BLUE/ 1982-83/ ROSALIE GASCOIGNE
Menzies
Dec. 01, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, COW ANTICS, 1976
Est: $20,000 - $30,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) COW ANTICS, 1976 printed cardboard (cut–out and reassembled Norco butter logos) on weathered wood panel 35.0 x 50.5 cm signed with initials and dated verso: R.G. ’76 PROVENANCE Gallery A, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1976 Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 28 August 2002, lot 145 (as ‘Norco Cows’) Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne – Assemblage, Gallery A, Sydney, 11 September – 2 October 1976, cat. 41 (as ‘Cowantics’ [sic.]) LITERATURE Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 105, pp. 169 (illus.), 317, 414 RELATED WORK Norco Cows, 1976, printed cardboard (cut–out and reassembled Norco butter logos) on weathered wood panel, 44.0 x 73.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Deutscher and Hackett
Dec. 01, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, BEATEN TRACK, 1992
Est: $400,000 - $600,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) BEATEN TRACK, 1992 sawn wood soft drink crates on plywood 122.0 x 110.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992 / BEATEN TRACK signed and dated verso [inverted]: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992 PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1992 Christie’s, Sydney, 24 May 2005, lot 38 Private collection, London EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 15 April – 2 May 1992, cat. 10 Toi Toi Toi, Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 23 January – 5 April 1999; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand, 22 May – 4 July 1999, cat. 67 LITERATURE Toi Toi Toi, Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, 1998, cat. 67, p. 64 (illus.) McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, pl. 31, pp. 69 (illus.), 114 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 428, pp. 84, 253 (illus.), 413 ESSAY ‘Second hand materials aren’t deliberate; they have sun and wind on them. Simple things. From simplicity you get profundity.’1 With her training in the formal discipline of Ikebana complementing her intuitive understanding of the nature of materials, her deep attachment to her environment and later interest in modern art, Rosalie Gascoigne remains one of Australia’s most unique and beloved contemporary artists. Bespeaking a staunchness and scrupulous eye, her works are artful and refined, yet always betray a tangible connection to the outside world, powerfully evoking remembered feelings or memories in relationship to the landscape – they are ‘instances of emotion recollected in tranquillity’ to quote a phrase of Wordsworth’s which was so dear to her. Notwithstanding her formidable reputation today as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century however, remarkably Gascoigne’s career as a professional artist did not begin until the age of 57 when she exhibited four assemblages in a group show in Sydney. Immediately attracting enthusiastic praise from collectors and critics alike, she was soon offered her maiden solo exhibition at a public institution in 19782, and in 1982, was selected as the inaugural female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale where she unveiled, among other works, Scrub Country, 1981 – the first of her now-famous creations constructed from weathered soft-drink crates. A magnificent example of these shimmering ‘black-on-gold’ assemblages fashioned from hand sawn Schweppes wooden crates, significantly Beaten Track, 1992 was first exhibited in the artist’s seminal solo exhibition held at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney in April – May of that year. Heralding Gascoigne’s transition from busy, brightly-coloured works employing several materials towards calmer, more meditative pieces in natural wood, the show remains widely recognised as one of the most ground-breaking of her unconventional career – attested by the fact that at least nine of the works exhibited have subsequently entered prestigious collections internationally including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the National Gallery of Victoria; and the Macquarie Bank Collection. Bearing striking stylistic affinities with Gascoigne’s celebrated four-panel masterpiece, Monaro, 1989 in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Beaten Track similarly draws its inspiration from the artist’s immediate surroundings – namely the spacious grazing lands of the Monaro region on the outskirts of Canberra with their seasonal variation, diverse topography and myriad traces of history and use. Yet despite their specific impetus, such compositions notably do not depict or symbolise the local landscape; rather the deft arrangement and tonal variation of the wooden slivers eloquently conveys a larger, more universal sense of place that is, paradoxically, ‘both nowhere and everywhere at once.’3 Eschewing the use of iconography to present the viewer with openings to a number of worlds – and not simply the land as a conventional visual essay where form and subject correspond – thus Gascoigne creates exquisite distillations of the landscape that resonate with a virtually endless allusive power. With their rhythmic pattern composed of letters – ‘text transformed into texture’ – such assemblages have, not surprisingly, been described as ‘concrete stammering poems’4, a perceptive analogy given the artist’s predilection for poetry from Shakespeare to Plath. Nevertheless, Gascoigne reiterates that the flickering word fragments, though carefully arranged, are not intended to be read literally: ‘Placement of letters is important, but it’s not a matter of reading the text – it’s a matter of getting a visually pleasing result.’5 Similarly, her titles are also not prescriptive but rather, ‘leave room for the viewer’6, imbued with various levels of meaning to be deciphered according to the nature of one’s experiences. Accordingly, while ‘Beaten Track’ may seem a fitting description for this unruly path of black lettering laid out against the promise of ‘a yellow brick road’, what also springs to mind is the expression ‘off the beaten track’ – a concept whose appropriateness becomes all the more apparent the longer one gazes at the work. For that is precisely what Beaten Track encapsulates – redolent with poetic possibility, it is a catalyst for ideas not yet encountered, an invitation to venture to places not yet explored. As John McDonald elucidates, Gascoigne’s art ‘…awakens associations that lie beneath the surface of consciousness, inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us…’7 Indeed, it is this higher awareness, the ability to recognise beauty in the most humble and unprepossessing of materials that Gascoigne demands of her audience. For, as the eye moves through this skilful arrangement searching for information within the weathered components, and the mind attempts to place different rules of perspective or build upon the suggestion of the marks, ‘in time we recognise that the only solution is to stop trying to navigate through the forest of symbols and to enjoy the beauty of the trees.’8 1. The artist cited in Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape, Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 11 2. Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 April – 4 June 1978 3. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, 1989, p. 18 4. Hilty, G., A rt Monthly, United Kingdom, September 1997, p. 46 5. The artist cited in MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 35 6. The artist, cited ibid. 7. McDonald, J., 'Introduction', in MacDonald, op. cit., p. 7 8. Ibid. VERONICA ANGELATOS
Deutscher and Hackett
Oct. 04, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Blue Water 1977 wood, ceramic, rubber, iron, printed tin and nails
Est: $15,000 - $20,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Blue Water 1977 wood, ceramic, rubber, iron, printed tin and nails 21 x 56 x 12cm PROVENANCE: Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Brisbane Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITIONS: Objects, Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, March 1977 "Outstanding are the assemblages by Rosalie Gascoigne. Her imagination and sensitivity to beauty metamorphose humble, discarded things into marvellous, new creations. It has to be seen to be believed that she can create a thing of visual poetry with a weathered wooden box (she may have found it in a farm yard), containing an arrangement of Toohey's Bitter Ale tins." (catalogue essay) LITERATURE: Visual Poetry: Creations from Collections of Refuse, Courier Mail, Brisbane, 12 March 1977 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, 2019, p. 176, cat. no. 137
Leonard Joel
Sep. 14, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, AUTUMN, 1989
Est: $180,000 - $240,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) AUTUMN, 1989 painted and stencilled sawn wood from discarded soft drink crates on plywood backing 92.0 x 83.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: AUTUMN 1989 / Rosalie Gascoigne PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1989 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 31 October - 18 November 1989, cat. 15 LITERATURE McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 346, pp. 236 (illus.), 332 ESSAY Rosalie Gascoigne first used the planks of found soft-drink crates in her work in the late 1970s, employing the wooden boards of brands such as Tarax, Crystal, Swing, and most notably, the distinctive daisy-yellow of Schweppes, in elegant compositions that lyrically evoked the Australian bush. Gascoigne was initially dependent upon finding this ‘new’ material in the various dumps that she haunted on the outskirts of Canberra, but soft-drink crates were to become something of a signature material after she discovered them in abundance in a depot at Queanbeyan, where discarded crates could be bought by the truckload. As a result of the artist’s maxim, ‘See a lot, take a lot’1, her frequently replenished stockpile allowed an ongoing dialogue with this material that was to extend over many years. Gascoigne soon progressed from working with larger boards to splitting or sawing the planks into strips or small squares, before moving, as she has in Autumn, 1989 to assembling panels of these strips before gluing them to backing boards. The sense of movement that these component parts enabled, and the ability to try things out three-dimensionally, was an essential part of her act of making, as she never sketched or pre-planned anything on paper. As Gascoigne’s studio assistant, artist Peter Vandermark has commented: ‘Her hands were always moving things around, her eyes always assessing the arrangements her hands made. She’d say her art was seeing, watching and trying out...’2 Despite Gascoigne’s self-proclaimed role as a ‘regional artist’, few of her works respond directly to a particular place or experience and instead conjure the sensations or essence of being in the landscape. Gascoigne’s ‘place’ – the Canberra/Monaro region, is instead the starting point for works whose associative and experiential possibilities reverberate beyond her immediate environment and come to evoke the Australian landscape more broadly. The title of her works also play an important role, as Gascoigne never named a piece until it was finished; giving herself time to sit with her art and encouraging a piece to ‘work on’ her, before endowing it with a name. As a result, the intrinsic connection between the work and its name – which often reflects her love and knowledge of Romantic poetry – creates an active and participatory role for the viewer who is given a starting point, but then left to infer, imagine and experience an individual and necessarily personal response. In many ways, it is within this space of discovery and re-discovery, of shifting moods and associations, that the power of Gascoigne’s work lies. The jostling squares of Autumn – with its bleached and weathered slithers of burnished yellow and red, capture the season at its most majestic, as the leaves change colour and fall from the trees, creating a carpet of amber upon the ground. We can almost feel and hear the rustling of our feet moving through piles of leaves. Yet to experience Gascoigne’s Autumn is to also come to understand the transience of nature, and of life, as captured in a poem she likely knew – Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923): ‘Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay.’3 1. Gascoigne mentioned the importance of this approach to her practice in various interviews throughout her career, first stating in 1972: ‘…If it looks good to me, I keep it. I never bother at the time what I am going to do with it. I take it home and store it on exposed shelves in the garden. It may or may not come good for me. I like to have a lot of stuff to look at.’ Artist statement in Bottrell, F., The Artist Craftsman in Australia, Jack Pollard, Crows Nest, New South Wales, 1972, p. 39 2. ‘Peter Vandermark and Marie Hagerty in Conversation with Mary Eagle’ in Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, The Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 20 3. Frost, R., Nothing Gold Can Stay, ‘Poetry Foundation’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148652/nothing-gold-can-stay-5c095cc5ab679, accessed 15 August 2022\ KELLY GELLATLY © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2022
Deutscher and Hackett
Sep. 11, 2022
Rosalie Gascoigne
Est: $200 - $400
Rosalie Gascoigne decorative print of original, Metropolis. Image: 45 x 63cm (frame 83 x 98cm)
Charleston's Fine Art Auctions
Aug. 24, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Plaza 1988 sawn plywood retro-reflective road signs on plywood
Est: $200,000 - $300,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Plaza 1988 sawn plywood retro-reflective road signs on plywood signed, dated and inscribed '"PLAZA" / 1988 / Rosalie Gascoigne' verso 148 x 84.5 cm PROVENANCE Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 26 October 1989 Important Australian Art, Sotheby's Australia (now trading as Smith & Singer), Sydney, 25 August 2015, lot 14, illustrated Private Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, 28 September - 15 October 1988, no. 2 Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 31 October - 18 November 1989, no. 7 (label verso) LITERATURE Christopher Allen, 'Bill Robinson; Rosalie Gascoigne', Art Monthly Australia, December 1989 - January 1990, p. 19 Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 336, p. 234 (illustrated)
Smith & Singer
Jul. 27, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, LASSETER'S REEF, 1993/1996 – 97
Est: $150,000 - $200,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) LASSETER'S REEF, 1993/1996 – 97 retro-reflective road sign on wood 84.0 x 122.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1996–97 / LASSETER’S REEF PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1998 Christie’s, Sydney, 13 August 2000, lot 51 The Cbus Collection of Australian Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 April – 2 May 1998, cat. 6 Toi Toi Toi, Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 23 January – 5 April 1999; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand, 22 May – 4 July 1999, cat. 73 Colour and Movement, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria, 19 February – 9 June 2016 on long term loan to Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales LITERATURE Toi Toi Toi, Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, 1998, cat. 73, p. 83 (illus.) Nainby, B., Stanhope, Z., and Furlonger, K., The Cbus Collection of Australian Art, in association with Latrobe Regional Gallery, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 17, 168 (illus.), 219 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 614, pp. 124, 296 (illus.), 416 ESSAY Lasseter’s Reef, 1993/1996 – 97 glimmers with the numinous energy that Rosalie Gascoigne was able to summon from her materials and alludes to a mirage, the contemporary tall tale from which it derives its title. Rosalie Gascoigne’s art was deeply informed by the geographic features of her adoptive Australian homeland and followed a progression of formal and abstract distillation. Her works were all anchored in the aesthetic qualities of her found materials and their poetic associative power. Often the origin and function of her found objects was completely obscured by the artist’s process of alteration, fragmentation and reconstitution. Lasseter’s Reef is amongst a handful of works within Gascoigne’s oeuvre that directly reference their own retro-reflective surface, honouring the creative and poetic potential that was concealed in their original function as road-signs. In appropriating the arresting blaze required for safety in street signage to evoke the enticing (but ultimately unreliable) glimmer of treasure and fame, Gascoigne created tongue-in-cheek works with names such as Flash Art, 1987; All that Glisters, 1989; Fool’s Gold, 1992 (National Gallery of Australia); Danegeld, 1995, and the present Lasseter’s Reef. This last work was initially conceived in 1993 (as photographs of the artist’s studio have recorded), before being reworked into its final form in May 1997 prior to the artist’s antepenultimate solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley in April 1998. The title that was applied to the final product refers to a vast mythical quartz and gold vein that Harold Bell Lasseter claimed to have found in Central Australia in 1897, before perishing on a subsequent prospecting expedition to the area in 1930. His story persisted as a famous Australian folktale throughout the mid twentieth century. This planar assemblage is almost entirely abstract, founded on the rhythm and order of a tessellated Modernist grid. The rigour of this arrangement is disrupted by the irregularities of her found materials. Although arrestingly bright, the shine and yellow hue of Lasseter’s Reef is not uniform. The variations in the wear and tear of each fragment of signage produce a dappled monochromatic surface that pays homage to the element on which Australia built its wealth, while also being “a warning and a promise, that is, of man’s ability to degrade the land and to create beauty”.1 As the celebrated art critic Sebastian Smee noted at the time in his review of the original exhibition: “these works are about the solidly real and transitory all at once”.2 The artist herself placed mystical meaning in the visual effects of this transient shimmer, in the same year explaining: “I don’t think you want the solid shine so that it always shines […] It is a terribly good omen to see a shine coming out of a picture and then it just sulks, and the sun goes around”.3 1. Mary Eagle, notes, National Gallery of Australia 1993, cited in Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, p. 15 2. Smee, S., ‘The Prime of Rosalie Gascoigne’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 April 1998, p. 11 3. The artist, 1998, quoted in, Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 277 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2022
Deutscher and Hackett
Jun. 29, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Thermals 1998
Est: $80,000 - $100,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Thermals 1998 sawn, painted, stencilled and inscribed wood from cable reels on backing board 84.0 x 77.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Rosalie Gascoigne/ 1998/ THERMALS
Menzies
Jun. 29, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), City Block 1996
Est: $80,000 - $100,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) City Block 1996 sawn, painted and stencilled plywood on board 88.0 x 77.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Rosalie Gascoigne/ 1996/ CITY BLOCK
Menzies
May. 04, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, JIM’S PICNIC, 1975
Est: $40,000 - $60,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) JIM’S PICNIC, 1975 printed cut-out cardboard shapes (Arnott's logos), glass bottles, dried (rye) grass, wire netting, weathered timber 44.0 x 75.0 x 22.0 cm signed with initials and dated at base: R.G. ‘76 PROVENANCE Gallery A, Sydney James Mollison, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1976 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers–Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in April 2006 (label attached verso) Bonhams, Sydney, 26 June 2013, lot 25 Gould collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 15 March 2017, lot 19 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne: Assemblage, Gallery A, Sydney, 11 September – 2 October 1976, cat. 25 Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 April – 4 June 1978, cat. 21 Blue Chip VIII: the collectors' exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 7 March – 1 April 2006, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue p. 5 and cover) LITERATURE Lindsay, R., Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 2, 5 (illus.), 6 Kirk, M., 'Different Means to Similar Ends: Rosalie Gascoigne and Agnes Martin', Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 23, no. 4, Winter 1986, p. 513 Edquist, H., 'Material Matters – the Landscapes of Rosalie Gascoigne', Binocular, Sydney, no. 3, 1993, p. 1 MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Australian National University, Canberra, 2000, pp. 30 – 31 (illus.) Rosalie Gascoigne: plain air, City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2004, p. 22 (illus.) Fink, H., 'The Life of Things: Rosalie Gascoigne at Gallery A Sydney', Gallery A, Sydney, 1964 – 1983, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2009, p. 163 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 084, pp. 54, 91, 95 (illus.), 106, 111, 133, 164 (illus.), 317, 320 ESSAY Jim’s Picnic, 1975, like many great artworks, was born of a perfect storm of personal artistic evolution and national cultural circumstance. Newly arrived in Deakin, Rosalie Gascoigne embarked on an Ikebana course from the modern Sogetsu School. For Gascoigne, this disciplined artistic practice gave new purpose and direction to her habit of foraging for materials in the landscape.1 It also stimulated Gascoigne’s growing involvement in the Canberran art scene, introducing her to James ‘Jim’ Mollison, who had also recently arrived in the capital to assist with the development of the national art collection, under the political tutelage of Gough Whitlam. A rare instance within Gascoigne’s oeuvre of direct inspiration from a significant life event, Jim’s Picnic is an assemblage commemorating a bucolic escapade organised by Mollison for an international artistic delegation on the 16 April 1975. The artist spoke of this artwork in a lecture at the Canberra School of Art in 1985: ‘This one is called Jim’s Picnic. It was about a picnic and it was meant to be impractical, it was a windy day on top of a mountain. The wire netting I have used is a pretty sort of netting. It gives a good visual reading; in feel, it is mountain air. I was enclosing air with those spaces. The grass stuck in the bottles is as ephemeral as you can get, and it was to show this awful – it wasn’t awful, it was a marvellous impractical picnic with the clouds coming over, the kangaroos hopping up and down. The kangaroos are the parrots, if you can bear the transition, but that was the life element in it and it was to capture the actual event.’2 Jim’s Picnic is a delicate sculpture that encapsulates several key aspects of Gascoigne’s artistic practice: the use of found objects to translate visual and cultural realities, the impetus to capture ephemeral meteorological and geographical phenomena, and the self-assured arrangement of these items into an aesthetic composition. A particularly endearing aspect of this work is Gascoigne’s flight of imagination in transposing the bounding figures of kangaroos into the iconic parrots of the Australian Arnott’s biscuits.3 Exhibited in Gascoigne’s radical first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Sydney, in 1976, Jim’s Picnic was purchased by James Mollison, for whom it was named, and remained within his personal collection throughout his tenure as Director of the Australian National Gallery. 1. Gellatly, K., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: Making Poetry of the Commonplace’, Rosalie Gascoigne, Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, pp. 12 – 13 2. Rosalie Gascoigne, Illustrated lecture to students at Canberra School of Art, 21 August 1985, cited in Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 164 3. ibid., p. 95 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2022
Deutscher and Hackett
May. 04, 2022
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, SUMMER STACK, 1990
Est: $160,000 - $200,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) SUMMER STACK, 1990 sawn soft drink crates on plywood mounted on board 91.5 x 69.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: SUMMER STACK / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1990 PROVENANCE Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1991 Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 56 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 26 August 2015, lot 20 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, 17 April – 11 May 1991, cat. 7 Circle Line Square: Aspects of Geometry, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 16 September – 21 October 1994; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales, 16 December 1994 – 29 January 1995; Albury Regional Art Centre, New South Wales, 28 April – 28 May 1995; New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales, 4 – 27 August 1995 LITERATURE Zimmer, J., Circle Line Square: Aspects of Geometry, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 1994, p. 18 McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 McCulloch, A., McCulloch, S., & McCulloch Childs, E., The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 453 (illus.) Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 384, pp. 95, 244 (illus.), 336, 375 ESSAY Although universally regarded as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century, remarkably Rosalie Gascoigne did not hold her first exhibition until the age of 57. Immediately attracting the praise of collectors and critics alike, she was soon offered a major survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (1978) and in 1982, was selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale (alongside Peter Booth), being the first Australian woman to receive this honour. In more recent years, she has featured in numerous important and international exhibitions - including the prestigious solo exhibition show Material as Landscape held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Australia (1997 – 98) – and today is represented in all major collections in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Of all Rosalie Gascoigne's achievements, undoubtedly the most striking and widely celebrated are her assemblages such as Summer Stack, 1990 constructed from weathered wooden Schweppes soft drink crates, sliced into thin, uneven slivers with a bandsaw. Like many other compositions from this highly acclaimed series, including the monumental Monaro, 1989 (Art Gallery of Western Australia), the present draws its inspiration from her immediate surroundings, namely the spacious grazing lands of the Monaro region near Canberra. Accordingly, the rhythmic arrangement and tonal variations of the wooden slivers here allude to the crisscross patterned haystacks so characteristic of this agricultural locale – the transient shadows and play of light evoking a strong sense of place, of the timeless spirit of the landscape. Profoundly lyrical and refined yet always maintaining a close proximity to the outside world, Gascoigne's sensibility of place is thus, paradoxically, 'both nowhere and everywhere at once'.1 As Martin Gascoigne elucidates, '... her work was very much about recollected feelings or emotions, especially in relation to the landscape around Canberra. Her works touched on all aspects of that landscape, its changing look with the changing seasons, its varied topography, and the traces of its history and use. Summer Stack can be seen in this context. In the same period, she made a number of works that reflect this, including Wheat Belt, 1989 and Stooks, 1991 – 92.’2 Having eschewed the use of iconography, Gascoigne favours allusion and suggestion so that her work might 'speak for itself' as art, awakening '... associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us.’3 Indeed, it is this higher awareness, the ability to recognise beauty in the most humble of materials that Gascoigne demands of her audience. For as the eye moves through this artful arrangement searching for information, and the mind attempts to place different rules of perspective or build upon the suggestion of the marks, 'in time we realise that the only solution is to stop trying to navigate through the forest of symbols, and enjoy the beauty of the trees.’4 1. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, c.1989, p. 18 2. Gascoigne, M., in correspondence with Damian Hackett, 2004 3. McDonald, J., 'Introduction', MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 7 4. Ibid. VERONICA ANGELATOS © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2022
Deutscher and Hackett
Feb. 23, 2022
Gascoigne, Rosalie
Est: €10,000 - €15,000
Gascoigne, Rosalie Auckland/Neuseeland, 1917 - Canberra, 1999 167 x 133 cm Highway to heaven, 1994. Acrylic on Japanese paper, mounted on silk. Kaku kite, Nobuhiku Yoshizumi. Cf. Gascoigne, 274.
Nagel Auction
Dec. 01, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Bird Sanctuary 1975
Est: $25,000 - $35,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Bird Sanctuary 1975 wooden apiary box, wood, steel mesh, metal gasket, glass jars, bird seed and collage 68.0 x 37.0 x 14.0 cm signed with initials and dated verso: R.G. 76 [sic]
Menzies
Dec. 01, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Siesta 1997
Est: $45,000 - $65,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Siesta 1997 retroreflective road signs on board 27.0 x 36.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Rosalie Gascoigne/ 1997/ SIESTA
Menzies
Dec. 01, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999), Good News 1997
Est: $40,000 - $60,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Good News 1997 sawn, painted and stencilled plywood on board 43.5 x 26.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Rosalie Gascoigne/ 1997/ GOOD NEWS
Menzies
Nov. 23, 2021
Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999)
Est: $2,000 - $3,000
Across Town, 1991 three colour silkscreen on paper, edition: 26/99, numbered and signed below image '26/99, Rosalie Gascoigne'
Shapiro Auctioneers
Nov. 16, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Drawing Board 1996 sawn painted and stencilled plywood from cable reels on composition board
Est: $80,000 - $100,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Drawing Board 1996 sawn painted and stencilled plywood from cable reels on composition board signed, dated and inscribed 'Rosalie Gascoigne / 1996 / DRAWING BOARD' verso 62 x 51 cm PROVENANCE: Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide Private Collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 1998 EXHIBITIONS: Rosalie Gascoigne, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 19 August - 13 September 1998, no. 14 Greenaway Art Gallery at Australian Contemporary Art Fair 6, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1-4 October 1998 LITERATURE: Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 575, p. 288 (illustrated)
Smith & Singer
Nov. 10, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE, TARTAN, 1998
Est: $90,000 - $120,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 - 1999) TARTAN, 1998 sawn, painted and stencilled wood from cable reels on board 91.0 x 93.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1998 / TARTAN PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 25 September 1999, cat. 13 (illus. on exhibition invitation) Rosalie Gascoigne, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 77 LITERATURE Gellatly, K. (with Clark, D. and Gascoigne, M.), Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 113 (illus.), 136 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 667, pp. 305 (illus.), 347, 353, 418 ESSAY Rosalie Gascoigne, one of the most important Australian artists of the 20 th century, achieved late in life accolades that no woman artist before her ever had. Her humble and frugal art was deeply informed by the geographic features of her adopted Australian homeland and followed a progression of formal and abstract distillation, moving gradually from sculptural maquettes to bold and graphic planar assemblages. Her late assemblages on board varied in format from minute colour and textural studies to massive road sign and Schweppes-crate metaphorical landscapes. These works were all anchored in their emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of her found materials and its poetic associative power. The origin and function of her found objects (transport crates, cable reels, road signs, wood, china and linoleum) was often completely obscured by the artist’s process of fragmentation and reconstitution. Instead of making the material qualities the subject of her artistic intervention, it was the palimpsestic traces on their surfaces that fascinated the artist: traces of the life it has lived in the harsh Australian landscape: bleaching, warping, bruising and cracking. In 1998, Rosalie Gascoigne was aged 85 and despite having spent the majority of her life as an expatriate, found herself reflective on her early childhood in New Zealand, incorporating flashbacks to old experiences and places into her artworks.1 While all of Gascoigne’s works had a certain site-specific autobiographical quality, the rhythmic and noisy bricolage, Tartan, 1998, reveals in its title a cultural metonymy that linked the artist with her own ancestral roots. This work is a studio work, an intellectual puzzle on a modest scale. Using, with an astounding economy, nothing but the tonal contrast between black stencilled text and its weathered painted hardwood support, Gascoigne evokes the crisscross woven patterns of tartan fabric. Tartan is the symbolic national dress of Scotland and was used here as expression of the artist’s own origins, well-to-do Anglo-Scottish and Irish protestant, and more broadly an interrogation of colonial legacy of the English empire on the far-flung lands of Oceania where she resided. William C Seitz likened the assemblage artist to a modern-day poet and this rings especially true for Rosalie Gascoigne, whose works were a product of the co-existence of natural and cultural processes. Arranged around the structural principle of the grid (her most Modern artistic device2), small sections of hardwood, tesserae, are cut into carefully proportioned crisp squares and equilateral triangles. Their rigorous arrangement into vertical and horizonal dominant lines emphasizes the dissonant curved printing of the text, this tension creating a dynamic quality within the square picture plane. The restriction of Gascoigne’s palette to materials that she had gathered during her rambles through the plains of the Monaro region necessarily created series of works with repeated visual strategies and materials. The titles were then added after completion and according to Mary Eagle, were ‘neither bound to, nor reflected the process of construction’.3 In 1993, some 5 years prior to the construction of Tartan, Gascoigne chanced upon some wooden cable spools, used to transport telephone powerlines and fencing wire. These large hardwood reels had several aesthetic attractions for her: curved rims painted in vibrant colours (red, yellow, orange, white and black) and were often stencilled, stamped and inscribed with letters and numbers, and punctured with uniform holes. While at first she prioritized the use of the “grubby white spools” between 1993 – 1994, Gascoigne moved quickly on to the ones for copper wire, painted red. Many of the works created with this wood used colour associations for their titles: Shabby Summer, 1994- 5, The Apple Isle 1994 – 95, Wild Strawberries, 1995, Embers I and II, 1998, Rose Hips, 1998, Ruby Rose, 1998, Western Plains, 1998, Carnival, 1998 and Fiesta, 1999.4 Tartan was included in Gascoigne’s last solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, by which point the artist was too ill to travel to see and passed away a month later. Alongside Tartan were intimate works focused on textural minutiae, and her last major masterpieces: Metropolis and Great Blond Paddocks, both of which were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales that year. Tartan was also chosen to be included in the last major retrospective exhibition to be held in Australia of Rosalie Gascoigne’s work, at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Melbourne, in 2008–09. 1. O’Brien, G., ‘Plain Air/Plain Song’ in Rosalie Gascoigne, Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington, Victoria University Press, 2004, p. 47 2. Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne. Material as Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 13 3. Eagle, M., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’, From the Southern Cross: A view of world art, c.1940 – 1988, Biennale of Sydney, 1988, p. 132 4. Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, pp. 76, 125 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2021
Deutscher and Hackett
Nov. 10, 2021
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Across Town 1991 screenprint, ed. 42/99
Est: $2,000 - $3,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Across Town 1991 screenprint, ed. 42/99 editioned and signed in pencil below image 30.5 x 60cm PROVENANCE: Art Monthly Australia, Canberra 2011 Private collection, Canberra OTHER NOTES: Coming into art later in her life, Gascoigne is best known for her evocative trademark assemblages of yellow road signs with the letters reworked. This screenprint was commissioned and published by Art Monthly and released in 1991.
Leonard Joel
Apr. 20, 2021
§ ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Gaudy Night 1992 sawn wooden soft drink crates and linoleum on retroreflective road signs on plywood
Est: $80,000 - $120,000
§ ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 1917-1999 Gaudy Night 1992 sawn wooden soft drink crates and linoleum on retroreflective road signs on plywood signed, dated and inscribed 'GAUDY NIGHT / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992' verso 79.5 x 76 cm PROVENANCE: Rosalie Gascoigne, Canberra Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label verso) Private Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1992 EXHIBITIONS: Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 15 April - 2 May 1992, no. 20 My Favourite, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Surfers Paradise, 2000, no. 18 LITERATURE: Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. no. 434, p. 255 (illustrated)
Smith & Singer
Dec. 01, 2020
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Blue Water 1977 wood, ceramic, rubber, iron, printed tin and nails
Est: $18,000 - $22,000
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917-1999) Blue Water 1977 wood, ceramic, rubber, iron, printed tin and nails 21 x 56 x 12cm PROVENANCE: Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Brisbane Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITIONS: Objects, Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, March 1977 "Outstanding are the assemblages by Rosalie Gascoigne. Her imagination and sensitivity to beauty metamorphose humble, discarded things into marvellous, new creations. It has to be seen to be believed that she can create a thing of visual poetry with a weathered wooden box (she may have found it in a farm yard), containing an arrangement of Toohey's Bitter Ale tins." (catalogue essay) LITERATURE: Visual Poetry: Creations from Collections of Refuse, Courier Mail, Brisbane, 12 March 1977 Cascoigne, M., Rosalie Cascoigne A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, 2019, p. 176, cat. no. 137
Leonard Joel